What Versailles is to the Augustan age of Louis Quatorze, that and more
is Fontainebleau to the French Renaissance. As the Palace in the Marsh
reflects and preserves for us the glories of the Grand Monarch, so the
Palace in the Forest reflects and preserves for us the glories of the
gay and splendour-loving kings from François Premier to Henri Quatre.
It embodies in itself at a single glance what may fairly be called the
age of the Médici in France, and shows us at one _coup d’œil_ the
entire history and development of Renaissance architecture among the
French people. Its great halls and long galleries are replete to this
day with memories of the giddy butterfly throng which crowded the court
of “the kings who amused themselves.”
From a very early period, a Château of the French kings occupied the
site of the existing palace. But of this building not a single relic
now shows externally in any part of the façade, with the solitary
exception of one mediæval turret, assigned to Saint Louis, and still
adjoining the Cour Ovale of the modern palace. The origin of the first
Château was simple and natural enough. It existed as a hunting tower in
the midst of a royal forest. In our own day, that wild woodland region
with its strange sandstone rocks and deep parallel valleys envisages
itself to most of us as a mere appanage of the great mansion which
skirts its fringe. But, in reality, it is the forest, of course, which
created the palace, and not the palace which created the forest. Some
thirty and five miles south-east of Paris, the Seine bends round and
partly traverses a remarkable district of long sandy ridges, tilted
up at an angle as the last subsiding ripple of that great secular
earth-wave which produced through slow ages the elevation of the
central European axis in the Alpine region. From time immemorial, this
light and somewhat sterile soil has been covered by a thick growth of
native oaks and beeches. The maritime pines and Riga spruces, indeed,
which add so greatly to the picturesque effect of the woodland at the
present day, are but recent introductions from the Mediterranean and
Baltic shore; and the whole forest as we now know it, has been trimmed
and dressed by the obtrusive art of the modern planter, out of all
similitude to its antique self. But the deciduous trees are for the
most part indigenous; and the few stags and wild boars still carefully
preserved by the game-keepers of the Republic represent the descendants
of a far wilder fauna which Merwing and Carling may well have hunted a
dozen centuries since under the spreading boughs of those ancient oaks
that bear to-day the quaint names of Pharamond and of Charlemagne.
[Illustration: FONTAINEBLEAU, FRANCE.]
The original Château, of which St. Louis’s bedchamber forms the chief
remaining portion, was probably founded under Louis VII. in the Twelfth
Century. The Chapel of Saint Saturnin, the first predecessor of the
existing church, has for Englishmen indeed a special interest from
the fact that it was consecrated by Thomas à Becket during his period
of exile from the anger of Henry at the French Court. The Château was a
favourite residence of the saintly Louis IX. whose name still clings to
the arcade of the Cour Ovale, though scarcely a trace of his buildings
has survived the complete reconstruction of the exterior front under
François Premier. The Fontainebleau of those days, in fact, was a
feudal castle of the frowning type with which we are all so familiar
along the banks of the Loire or among the dales of Normandy. Nothing
could be more different than its gloomy turrets, its narrow windows,
its airless halls, and its mediæval tortuousness, from the light, the
space, the air, the brightness of its Renaissance successor.
At last, however, François I. came. By his time, the character of the
French monarchy--the character of the French nation--had undergone
a complete and lasting change. Louis Onze had done his cruel work
both wisely and well. The feudal spirit was half broken; the task of
Richelieu was more than half begun. Unification and absolutism were the
order of the day all over Europe. Artillery had destroyed the power
of the great nobles in their massive castles. The introduction of
gunpowder, it has been well said, ruined feudalism. Fortresses which
had been impregnable against the attacks of the Middle Ages, crumbled
to pieces before one volley of the royal cannon. Throughout Europe, the
crown became everywhere irresistible. As a natural result of this great
social revolution, a Renaissance in architecture became inevitable
in the west, the kings and rulers of France and England exchanged the
gloomy darkness of the mediæval stronghold for the light and air and
spaciousness of the Italian mansion. The merchant republics of Italy
were already familiar with great princely palaces like the Pitti, and
the Strozzi, or the magnificent mansions which line the long curve of
the Grand Canal. Peace under the strong hand of the royal despot, were
he Valois or Tudor, made the imitation of these great houses possible
in the north and west. Threatening walls and serried battlements gave
way as if by magic to the pomp and grace of the Italianate mansion.
Knowle and Longleat, Burleigh and Hatfield, Hardwick and Audley End,
are familiar instances in England of the newer style. The high roofed
gables, the long lines of wide windows, the jutting oriels that look
down on the terraced Italian gardens, the vases and fountains, the
formal walks and parterres, all mark the arrival of a new epoch. The
mediæval castle was in essence a fortress adapted mainly for defence;
the Italian mansion is in essence a residence, adapted mainly for the
display of magnificence and wealth.
In France, this great revolution goes directly back to the influence
of the Medici. François Premier began the Louvre and began
Fontainebleau. With Louis XIII., the son of a Medici mother, both were
practically complete. The long succession of high Mansard roofs and
connecting galleries marks the very spirit and ideal of the French
Renaissance--its splendour, its grandeur, its vastness of aim, its want
of picturesque feeling, its love of the magnificent, its contempt of
the simple, the natural, the merely beautiful. Imposing Fontainebleau
extorts one’s admiration, it never attracts one’s love.
The nucleus of the existing building thus dates back practically to the
gay days of François Premier. It was he who rebuilt the chapel of Saint
Saturnin, and erected that magnificent pile of the Porte Dorée, whose
lavish display of glass in its broad-bayed windows looks like a modern
protest against the loopholes and embrasures of the Middle Ages. It was
he, too, who began the great Galerie des Fêtes, afterwards completed by
Henri II., whose name it now bears, as well as the Galerie d’Ulysse,
pulled down at a later date by Louis XV., to make room for the too
numerous ladies of his Sybaritic court. It is to François equally that
we owe the Cour Ovale, and the splendid Porte Dauphine or Baptistery,
which serves as its gateway. The initial _F_, so familiar to all
of us on the exquisite façade of the oldest portion of the Louvre,
reappears in many places on the gallery of the Cour de la Fontaine.
The only part of the gardens, recalling the Boboli or the villas of
Florence, which can with certainty be ascribed to this earliest date,
is that known as the Orangerie and the Parterre du Tibre. But the
grotto of what is now the Jardin Anglais was built by François as a
Salle de Bain for his favourite, the Duchesse d’Étampes. Nothing now
remains of that voluptuous retreat except the satyrs of the doorway and
some torsos of rough sandstone worn out of all semblance of human limbs
and muscles, and relegated to a place in the existing stables.
As yet, however, the artistic impulse came entirely from Italy. Serlio,
the architect, superintended the design; painters and sculptors from
beyond the Alps contributed the decorations. French art in those days
was still feeble and nascent. Florence sent Leonardo da Vinci and
Andrea del Sarto to the new palace at Fontainebleau; the rising school
of Primaticcio and Niccolo dell’ Abbate, whose artistic existence
almost sums itself up in the work they performed here. Indeed, it is
not too much to say that the pupils of Giulio Romano produced the
profoundest effects upon the French Renaissance, and influenced every
work of art of the entire period from the gallery of François Premier
to the Rubens’s in the Louvre.
The F. and the Salamander of the founder of the palace are to be found
abundantly on many portions of his magnificent erection. But the finest
hall of all, the Salle des Fêtes, bears now the name of Galerie de
Henri II., though built by François, because Henri decorated it in the
garish taste of the time to meet the wishes of his mistress, Diane de
Poitiers. This hall still remains the glory of Fontainebleau. Ninety
feet long by thirty broad, and profusely decorated, it speaks in every
part the taste of that gay and fantastic epoch. Ten colossal round
arches form the bays of the windows; five give upon the parterre, and
five on the Cour Ovale. The ornate ceiling is divided into octagonal
panels, richly wrought in architrave, frieze, and cornice, and bearing
in relief the intertwined initials of Henri himself and of the frail
Diane. Primaticcio and Niccolo supplied the frescoes; nameless Italian
artists moulded the stucco fretwork. The parquetry of the floor vies
with the roof in magnificence. This gorgeous apartment may well recall
the rooms of the gods in the Pitti Palace, and is only surpassed in
elaborate over-ornamentation and profuseness of handicraft by the gaudy
Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre.
When Henri II. died, mortally wounded in a tournament in the Palace
Courts, many things fell with him--tournaments themselves amongst
others, and mediævalism in France, and Diane de Poitiers. Catherine
de’ Medici sent the favourite packing to her Château d’Anet, and bore
rule herself in her stead in the half completed palace. The new king,
François II., was a true son of Fontainebleau. Here he was born in
1543, and here, a boy of seventeen, he married Mary Stuart, whom he
left a girl-widow so shortly after, to exchange the luxurious joys of
Fontainebleau for the cramped closets of Holyrood and the austerities
of John Knox and his brother Calvinists. Under Charles IX., the work
still went forward as before, and Primaticcio in his old age painted
the frescoes of the Galerie d’Ulysse, afterwards ruthlessly destroyed
under Louis XV.
Beyond being born in the palace, Henri III. contributed as little to
the history of Fontainebleau as to that of his dominions generally.
But Henri IV. left no small mark of his masterful hand on the great
growing pile whose overgrown area he well-nigh doubled. The Cour des
Offices, the Cour des Princes, the Galerie de Diane, the balustrades in
the Fountain Court, the decorations in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity,
the park with its grand canal and its ornamental waters, all date from
the days of the greatest of the Bourbons. But the French Renaissance
was not at its zenith. Married though he was to an Italian princess,
Henri entrusted his work for the most part to native workmen. Paul Bril
and Ambroise Dubois painted and decorated the greater part of the new
halls; the heads of Mercury, in the courtyard which still bears the
name of Henri Quatre are from the chisel of a later French sculptor,
Gilles Guérin; while the simple but noble doorway which opens upon the
Place d’Armes is the work of a local architect, François Jamin of Avon.
It was at Fontainebleau that Marie de’ Medici gave birth to Louis
XIII., who was baptized with his sisters under the quaint and ornate
cupola of the Porte Dauphine, known ever since from that cause by the
name of the Baptistery. To this one of its sons the palace owes its
latest main additions. He it was who built the handsome horseshoe
staircase in the Cour des Adieux, the masterpiece of Lemercier. With
that addition, the history of Fontainebleau practically ends. Events of
importance in the annals of France took place there later; but they are
not events in the annals of Fontainebleau. The great pile as we know it
was then really complete; it remains to us a vast museum of Renaissance
art and Renaissance feeling. Subsequent ages have destroyed, or
restored, or renovated, or tampered with it, but they have not added to
it, and the reason is clear. Louis Quatorze created Versailles; and the
rise of Versailles was the downfall of Fontainebleau.
Some few landmarks of its subsequent vicissitudes, however, are well
known to most of us. Louis Quatorze gilded it up, of course--what did
not Louis gild? Le Notre laid out the gardens--where did not Le Notre
spread his devastating gravel? Henrietta Maria of England took refuge
here among her own people when Charles had lost his head; Christina
of Sweden had made use of its hospitality as a capital opportunity to
murder Monaldeschi. Few buildings, indeed, have seen so many historic
events; for here Louis Quatorze signed the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes which deprived France at one blow of a million of citizens;
here Condé died; here James II. consoled himself with the consolations
of a heavenly crown for the loss of an earthly one; and here Peter
of Muscovy got royally drunk after his wont with all his suite, and
indulged in Russian horse-play in the ponds and gardens. Under Louis
Quinze, of funest memory, the decadence began; but still, as of old,
princes feasted and drank, married and were given in marriage, under
the high roofs of the palace. The king himself was united here to
Maria Leczinska. But the earthquake was at hand, for Voltaire came to
stay, and Jean Jacques Rousseau heard the court applaud his _Devin
du Village_. Louis Seize, good honest man, came often to hunt, but
the Revolution came too and gutted the Palace. During Napoleon’s wars,
it served as a barrack for prisoners. When Monarchy revived, Napoleon
spent ten millions of francs in restoring and refurnishing it. Later on
he used it as a prison for his spiritual father, Pius the Seventh; here
he divorced Josephine, and here he lived with Marie Louise of Austria.
Here too he signed his famous abdication, and reviewed a year later,
in the self-same court, the grenadiers of the Hundred Days who bore him
back to the Tuileries. There its memories end. What need to speak of
lesser things that have happened since, and obscure the recollection of
those great days in its history?